


and we held on to every single last word

by meritmut



Series: force bond moments [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (only mentioned), Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Grief/Mourning, Mutual Pining, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Psychic Bond, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, enemies trying to remind themselves they're actually enemies and not doing a great job of it, i love my lonely emotionally-stunted space kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-19 22:44:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: The bond pulls them together when they're at their most vulnerable: in moments of wonder and fear, in loneliness, and in grief.





	and we held on to every single last word

**Author's Note:**

> good night father, good night mother  
> are you still awake?
> 
> — iamx, 'oh beautiful town'
> 
> inspired in part by [this lovely art](http://elithien.tumblr.com/post/168701639762/elithien-weve-seen-kylo-visit-rey-through-their) of elithien's, and 'konstantine' by something corporate. title from 'wilderness' by bat for lashes.
> 
> ft. flagrant disregard for the rules tlj gave us re: the bond

It’s such a slight, subtle thing, in the end, that he’s barely awake to notice it.

There’s no great tectonic shift, no rising cry torn from the throats of millions, no sudden darkness as clouds obscure the sun and the stars themselves go black; none of the grave, magical portents that happen in the stories when the great galactic heroes die.

One moment she’s there, and then she simply—isn’t.

The grief will come later: what hits him first is the slow, numbing spread of shock, bleeding from the heart outwards, a feeling like cold hands reaching in between his ribs to pluck out something he'd almost forgotten was even there and leaving only a terrible absence in its place.

It takes a moment for Ben to put a name to that absence.

When he does, it knocks the wind from him.

Leia Organa has gone into the Force.

His mother is dead.

 

-

 

The bond is already burning when she reaches out to him through it.

Of course he knows. 

Leia was his _mother._ He’d probably felt it before Rey did.

She doesn’t know why she’s doing this, why she’s reaching out across the Force to him, why she’s seeking out her enemy when all she wants to do is hide away from the world and weep for the General where no one can see her, but some masochistic impulse makes her lean into the bond just a little, just enough to _feel_ —

She isn’t prepared for the wave of _grief_ that meets her. It hits her like the ground’s been kicked out from under her, a ragged sob tumbling from her lips—the Force is _drowning_ in misery, and she can scarcely breathe for it. She doubles over, winded by the feedback loop of heartache spun between them as Kylo—as _Ben_ —weeps, salt on her tongue and a lost boy crying in her head, it’s all Rey can do to stay silent, to press her hand over her mouth and let her own tears flow, neither knowing or caring if they’re for her own pain or his; for Leia, who had been as much of a mentor to her these past months as her own mother never was, or for that woman whose name and face she'll never know; the woman who’d given her life, and then left her.

 

-

 

It isn’t till hours later, when she’s curled up in her bunk with the covers pulled up over her head and her knees tucked into her chest, raw and weary and losing the fight with sleep, that she feels the bond begin to tug.

 _No,_ Rey thinks, _no, please, not now, I can’t,_ but the Force has never given a damn whether it suits them or not to be pulled to each other like this,  never cared that neither of them _wanted_ this. _No, please, don’t make me see this, don’t show me his pain, I don’t want to see it_ — maybe an energy with no conception of self cannot comprehend selfishness, or perhaps it understands all too well how insincere her words really are, that there’s a part of her even now that _yearns_ to be looked at the way he once did, to know that there is one place in the galaxy where she is utterly, completely _seen._

Whichever, it’s always when loneliness and loss unite them more closely that she has no defence against the pull of it, no fighting the grip of the current that takes her and draws her from the restless hush of the _Falcon_ into a silence far more profound.

When Rey opens her eyes, it’s to find herself in a bed that isn’t hers.

It’s only a little wider than her bunk on the _Falcon,_ which admittedly isn’t much more than a mattress crammed into the space between bulkheads and heaped with every spare blanket she could find on board. It’s been harder than she’d thought it would to acclimatise to things like real beds, and while the old ship’s crew quarters are hardly luxurious (by everyone’s standards but hers, apparently, though it’s not like the Resistance can afford to be choosy these days) compared to a hammock strung across the _Hellhound’s_ hollow belly it’s like sinking into water, too much and too little for her muscles to take even after all these months of trying to make the _Falcon_ feel like home.

This bed is too high and too deep, the sheets thinner and less scratchy than her own, the unfamiliar crispness of them a stark change to the comforting mustiness of her space on the _Falcon_. It’s darker, too, and quieter— no blinking consoles or chattering droids, not so much as a crack of light creeping in through the blacked-out viewport, only the distant steady hum of colossal engines to let her know she’s still on a ship at all.

That quiet wraps around her, and it’s so warm and comfortable and peaceful that for a few seconds Rey _forgets_ —she forgets the ache in her heart, forgets the bond, forgets Leia and everything that's happened since the attack two days ago. She even forgets the implications of waking up in someone else’s bed until she turns her face into the pillow and an unfamiliar scent assails her senses, and the sudden realisation of precisely _whose_ pillow she’s currently nuzzling has her scrambling upright, heat racing across her cheeks as the slide of fabric against her bare legs makes her acutely aware of the fact that she’s wearing a nightshirt and very little else.

She swings her feet hastily out of bed, snagging the sheet to wrap around herself before following the voiceless pull of the bond out into the next room.

In the flood of starlight that greets her, it takes a moment to find him.

Most of the far wall is taken up by a colossal viewport, clear transparisteel stretching from the ceiling almost to the floor and there, silhouetted against a backdrop of galaxies, kneels Ben Solo, cold starlight pouring in over his bowed head, threading like mist through his hair and throwing into sharp silvered relief every twitch, every tremor of the silent sobs that wrack his body.

The Force aches with his sorrow, an open wound that bleeds and bleeds and never has Rey felt more like an intruder than she does now, the same connection that brought her here giving her an unwanted window onto the pain of a man who’s caused her nothing but hurt himself. And yet, in the face of the devastation that brings Ben to his knees, her own suddenly feels like nothing more than the upstart tears of a girl with no family of her own to weep for.

What right has Rey to weep for a woman she’s known for less than a year, and compare that grief to that of a son for his mother? Who is she to dare?

_Foundling. Orphan. Cast-off. Unwanted refuse._

She’s never known her mother, doesn’t even know the woman’s name, she’s never been more than a wishful voyeur to the kind of love and loss that Ben mourns now.

It’s breaking him apart, and yet—he’d rejected that love. He’d rejected _Leia._

What right has _he_ to mourn her?

Rey might not have known a mother’s affection or pride but she’d known Leia’s, for however short a time, and had adored her in return. This is her loss, too. Maybe she has no right to be here but she has a right to her own pain. She has a right to grieve for it.

She moves forward, stepping across the light-years that stand between him and her as though they’re nothing because Ben Solo is her enemy but in this moment he’s just a boy weeping for his mother and she’s just a girl who lost her parents too young, and even if she couldn’t feel his heart breaking alongside her own it would move her.

They’re both orphans now, after all.

The closer she gets to him the more defined the room becomes around her, Ben’s reality taking on greater solidity as Rey trespasses into his end of the bond.

She’d thought it would die with Snoke, but the few times it’s brought them together since Crait have given proof to the lie that he’d held mastery over it. Whatever it is, wherever it came from, it was here before him and it is here after, and though they cut themselves off from it, it isn’t going anywhere.

It’s not often she’s able to surprise him, but Ben seems so lost that Rey’s right beside him before he registers her presence. He lifts his head slightly, and whatever she might’ve said dies in her throat at the raw _anguish_ on his face.

His eyes are puffy and bloodshot, his cheeks still wet with tears picked out in silver by the light of the stars. Though he doesn’t look up at her, his gaze lost in the void of space, there’s something in the way his whole body shifts infinitesimally towards her that lets Rey know she’s not unwelcome, nowhere near the intruder she’d thought she might be.

It’s only when she sinks down beside him and rests her fingertips lightly on his knee that those stars become clearly visible, his world fully realised around her.

They’re in orbit above the hemispheric curve of a frost-blue planet, the wide arc of a gas ring bisecting their view out into open space. She can’t see any more of the fleet from here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not nearby. For now, though, there’s nothing between the two of them and the universe.

Even a whisper feels too loud for this moment.

Ben’s breath catches as though he’s about to speak.

What words are there?

What words exist that are enough to fill a silence like this one, to bridge the gulf of grief that spans from here clear to the horizon, the space that cannot be travelled and yet must; you cannot go around it, nor back, you can only go forward, but ahead is vast and it frightens him more than anything, because he’s always been the one to urge her to leave the past behind but he’s never been able to do it himself, has been a hostage of his own history no less than she.

Sorrow twists through the Force, refracted a thousand times over between his heart and hers until it doesn’t matter whose the heartbreak is, it doesn’t matter that he’d surrendered any claim to kinship with his mother or that there’ll always be a part of Rey that feels like a pretender to this kind of connection, this depth of feeling: it’s his, and so it’s hers, and that Ben feels no more worthy to mourn Leia than Rey changes nothing when they can do nothing else.

“I felt it.” His voice is barely a whisper, he’s cried himself hoarse tonight and will do so again before morning, full of more misery than any one person can hope to bear.

Is it the will of the Force, then, that neither of them bear it alone?

(They hide so determinedly behind their shields, their anger and their bruised hearts that it can sometimes feel that way, but they’ll never be alone for as long as this bond exists, and though they’ve been the cause of more than enough hurt in one another’s lives it doesn't seem to matter when the Force draws them together.)

“I know,” Rey says softly, pushing past all the rules they’ve put in place to keep themselves safe to reach up and tentatively, gently, brush the dark fall of his hair out of his eyes. Ben accepts her touch without hesitating, turning his head into the gesture in a way that seems so instinctive, so perfectly, thoughtlessly natural that it causes a pang in her chest.

Months and weeks and the whole sorry, bloody breadth of this war between them, and all it takes is the brush of her hand for it all to melt away, for them to fit together again as though they were made to.

Maybe they were, she thinks, moving her thumb along his cheekbone below the dark bruise circling his eye, just beside where her scar splits his features. After everything, she can’t bring herself to regret it: it’s her, imprinted on his skin, a piece of her he chooses to keep and carry with him.

“They’re all gone,” he says dully. Beneath the glassy sheen of unshed tears his eyes are dim and dark, the skin beneath tacky and swollen when she traces her thumb across it. “It's just me now.”

 

-

 

There’s a voice in his head and it sounds everything and nothing like his former master when it demands, _and isn’t it what you wanted?_ Just as insidious, just as relentless, it whispers: _isn’t this what you fought to bring about? The past is dead. You are the last_. There is nothing left of his bloodline, nothing left to anchor him to the history he despises.

Nothing left but the guilt, and the grief, which might be enough to drown him.

 _You lost the right to this pain,_ he tells himself, over and over until the words lose meaning and it’s nothing more than a whispered prayer, a single torch to hold up against the night, _you gave it up, you set it alight and watched it burn,_ as though by repeating it he might convince his heart not to break. It’s not enough to even move him from the floor, to stir him from where he slumps against the viewport, drifting somewhere in the dark  ocean of stars beyond.

Somewhere out there are worlds where the light has yet to carry news of her passing; where, somewhere, his mother still lives.

 _On some of those worlds she hasn’t even been born yet,_ Ben thinks. His head swims in a scattered haze: strange thoughts have come to him over the past hours as he floats between dreaming and remembrance. _Neither has my grandfather, and neither have I_. Somewhere out there in the distant regions of the galaxy, the name Skywalker has never been heard.

He wonders if there is peace on those worlds.

Rey’s hand, strong and lean and warm, presses his knee.

She feels almost real, as though she were truly in the room with him.

She’s luminous, here, kneeling beside him with her face tilted up towards the light and her hair tumbling loose to frame features wreathed in silver by the radiance of the stars, a hundred billion systems strewn across the sky and all of them nothing to the delicate constellation of freckles dusting her cheeks. Her eyes are rimmed with red, the skin tender with weeping. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days.

Still, she’s sublime.

Her other hand moves from where she’s still lightly cradling his jaw and for a split second the loss of contact punches through him anew, but then she’s slipping her fingers between his and connecting them more fully, making tangible the thread that runs from him to her.

Ben finds himself staring down at their joined hands. It’s safer than the look in her eyes, or the ache of loss that’s still so fresh inside him. It hurts far less to think about.

Her hands fascinate him. For a human of her size they probably aren’t that unusual—maybe even ordinary, slender, with short-cut nails and calloused palms, a compact strength and a fighter’s grace, but next to his they’re so _small,_ her careworn fingers slight enough to nearly disappear in the cage of his blunt, ungainly fist. The slightest pressure might break her.

She gives his hand a squeeze, and he is reminded of who she is, and how much these hands have borne.

His mother has the daintiest hands of anyone he’s ever known. The last time he holds them in his own he can swallow them up: he dwarfs her already, head and shoulders above her and nearly twice as broad when he hugs her fiercely enough to make her protest, laughing as she runs her hands through his hair (long enough to hide his ears, he’s not yet grown into his features and something tells him where these are concerned he never will, still a boy and already he’s learning how to hide) like he can’t see her brown eyes shining, like they both can’t feel in the Force how much this moment costs. She’s here, today, so present and wonderful and warm that Ben can almost pretend that this isn’t what it is—that he isn’t leaving, isn’t being sent away, that his father stands beside her and she won’t be alone when she gets home.

 _Let us know where you are,_ Leia instructs, _and we’ll come and see you as soon as we can,_ and for one heartbeat they’re just a mother wishing her son well before he leaves to travel the galaxy, absent the fear of the heir to the Skywalker bloodline fully aware of the nascent darkness eating away at her only child’s heart, the slow corruption already crawling through his insides, turning him to the shadows from the inside out.

Had she known, then, when she kissed him goodbye, that it would be for the last time?

 _You knew,_ the boy who was Ben screams out from the vault of the past that entombs him, the memory he cannot escape no matter how far he runs, no matter the bridges he burns behind him. _You feared even then, all along you knew what awaited me in the dark, and you let it happen anyway._

 

-

 

The glass of the viewport is cold where it presses against his left side, Rey’s presence a bright flame of warmth where she sits at his right. Hours might pass while he drifts from thought to thought, and he wouldn’t notice.

The bond has never stayed open for this long before.

“I thought...somehow I always thought I’d see her again.” Ben looks up, chewing at the inside of his cheek to still the tremor in his jaw. “I never realised, until I felt—until I felt her go, but I’d always just...had the thought inside me. That we’d meet again, one day. That maybe it wasn’t too late.”

The connection permits a kind of honesty he doesn’t think he’d be capable of were she here in the flesh. Here in their minds, it’s only real if they want it to be.

“She knew,” Rey says quietly, still looking down at their hands. “I ended up telling her about—what happened, on the island, and with Snoke. I had to tell someone and...she had to know, why I went to you. Why I did something so reckless. Why I wouldn’t give up. Because she never did. Not really.”

Leia has been a friend and mentor in the truest sense of the words these past months, a steady hand to guide Rey through the navigation of her powers and her new role in the decimated Resistance. They’ve spoken for hours on end, swapped stories and healed old wounds, been more than commander and operative to one another. When the subject came up, Rey hadn’t even considered lying to her.

She still doesn’t know if it’s done any good.

“She should have,” Ben mutters, a darkness clouding over his features, “you should too. You made your choice.”

“I tried,” Rey replies, trying to keep the edge from her voice and not bite back _you made that choice_ for _me._ “It didn’t work. I could feel you. I still can.” But—oh, she’d been so angry, so _hurt,_ after Crait, and the _Supremacy,_ she’d fought tooth and nail to keep the bond closed in the weeks after just because she couldn’t bear to look at him and hear again that soft, broken _please._ Couldn’t bear to look into his eyes and see an enemy when not so long ago she’d looked into them and seen _hope._

(Those eyes are roving over the planes of her face now like he’s worried he might forget the precise configuration of her freckles, drinking her in and even though he’s trying _so_ hard to be angry with her, to cling to his sense of betrayal, he doesn’t bother to conceal how much he’s missed her. How much he _regrets,_ despite the way things ended, despite the fact that they stand on opposing sides of a war with no end in sight with nothing to blame but their own stubborn hurts.)

“I feel you, too,” he murmurs, “always.” A little furrow appears between his brows. “What did she say?” he asks, hesitant, “when you told her about the—about this?”

A sound that’s half-mirth, half-sob falls from her lips. “She laughed for a minute straight when I told her about Luke tearing the hut down.”

Ben looks shaken. “She laughed?”

Rey shrugs, though she’d been astonished too. “Someone has to find it funny, I suppose.”

Truthfully, it had been the first time she’d seen Leia laugh, really _laugh,_ so though it had pricked her pride at the time she can’t find it in herself to mind too much.

Ben looks more than a little perturbed by the notion.

“You did try to shoot me, the first time,” he remarks eventually, the spectre of a smile on his lips.

“You tried to mind-trick me,” she points out with only a shadow of her usual acerbity.

“It didn’t work.”

“Neither did shooting at you.”

She isn’t trying to make him smile for real. She isn’t sure _what_ she’s doing. Maybe it's just easier, pretending Leia's still around, speaking of her like this, seeing how strongly her wit and spirit live on in her son.

Maybe, Rey’s just tired of losing.

“You were sleeping,” Ben says suddenly, and of course he’d pick now to notice she’s wearing nothing more than a shirt and her dignity under the sheet. He can’t know that she’s been tossing and turning for hours, that every time she closes her eyes she sees Leia’s face the last time they’d spoken. He can’t know that in the end the quiet stir of the bond pulling her out of her own head and into his had felt almost a relief.

Rey tugs the blanket more closely around herself with her free hand, letting him keep her other wrapped up in his own. “I couldn’t,” she admits, unwilling to rend the quiet that encloses them so gently.

This close, it’s too much, and yet the idea of doing anything to disturb it never occurs to her.

“I can’t sleep, anymore,” Ben whispers, and his eyes are still fixed on the stars but she can see his reflection in the viewport and the look on his face takes her breath away. The dark circles under his eyes have deepened since the Force last brought them together. His features are drawn, sallow, too long deprived of natural light. “I dream.”

Rey knows. She’s seen them, she doesn’t need to ask. And yet—

“What about?”

The soft huffing breath that escapes him might, at a stretch, be laughter, if laughter were the sound of heartache incarnate.

“It’s always you, in my dreams,” he tells her, he never did have much aptitude for deceit and she’s been laying waste to his defences since the day they met—he’s not sure where this impulse to skin himself for her came from, but what’s the point in resisting when she’s in his head, his heart, has claimed a space for herself where he can never get her out?

Spurred on by loneliness, Ben leans in until he can rest his forehead against hers, and Rey will tell herself later that it’s only that she’s been touched so little in her life, that there’s a part of her that will always fold for the slightest measure of gentleness; that it would be a heartless thing to push him away now, but the truth is that here in the in-between of their minds, the argent light of an unfamiliar firmament pouring in through the viewport to tangle in his hair and the warm, steady rise and fall of him beneath her, is the closest to peace she’s felt in a long time: she meets him halfway, lets their noses brush and closes her eyes to the warm rush of his breath over her lips, and it feels like home. “Always.”

It _can’t_ be home, though, and her heart aches for it. No matter the peace they’ve found together tonight, once she leaves they go back to the war, she to her newfound family and he to his hollow throne.

The future she’d seen had offered them the chance at a home, and maybe in another life it could’ve been, but there is no place for that future in this one and there is no place for her here.

“Me too,” she says anyway, because she called him _liar_ once but she’s learned since then that there can be no lies here, in this slender thread of universe wound between their souls. There’s a safety, in that, but a terrible vulnerability too.

“I never know if it’s really you,” Ben confesses, “or if I’m dreaming you.”

The defeat in his voice breaks her all over again.

 _You’re my enemy,_ Rey thinks, _you chose the other side. You shouldn’t care._

“It’s me.” She lifts her free hand from his knee and rests it over his heart, slow and steady and in perfect sync with hers. “I’m here, Ben. I’m with you.”

“You say that, sometimes,” he murmurs sadly. The bond aches with a loneliness she’d never thought she’d have to feel again, and it hits her like a punch to the gut to recognise it in another.

He is utterly alone here, and it is all his own doing.

“Let me show you,” she says.

 

-

 

Rey’s hands are light on his as she pulls him into a memory, one she has carried within her ever since she stood on the sun-gilt shores of Lake Nymeve and felt for the first time the warmth of a golden afternoon on her skin. She draws him into the memory of sunlight, dancing over the glassy surface of the lake, the whisper of the wind in the trees and over the water, the distant slopes of the fells painted with gold.

This the day they met, Ben realises. Everything was already changing that day, for her as much as for him: it was already a day of beginnings, of wide-open horizons and awakenings, even before the Force pushed them into each other’s path and made their disparate fates converge. Barely a year ago, but it feels like a lifetime.

He stands beside her on the shore, memories of light washing over him.

It brings her comfort, this recollection. It’s where she goes where no one can find her. Even he doesn't know it. She’d thought it might help.

Wordlessly, because he has no response for her boundless capacity for grace, Ben shifts the vision around them, guiding Rey with him into a new one. Another shore, another water. An indigo sea as wide and dark as the night sky, curving around the crescent moon of a pristine beach. Across the bay sits a shining city of ivory and gold, green gardens and boulevards flourishing here and there beneath its star-white spires, brightly-coloured rooftops gleaming like jewels in the sun.

The bond glows with Rey's wonder as she spins, slowly, on the spot.

“Where...?”

“Hanna.” Ben glances over at the distant city. “This is where I was born. Where—”

He falters.

The light dusts her cheeks with gold. Her eyes are huge and endlessly sad.

“Where you were happy.”

He’d do anything to see that sadness gone, he realises. It’s a strange impulse, but not entirely alien where she is concerned. He’s wanted to wage war on her hurts from the instant he learned their names.

But—he’s never known _how._

“Oh…” Rey lets out a breath. Ben follows her gaze down to the shore.

Down by the water, a woman and boy walk barefoot along the sand, the foaming surf breaking gently over their ankles. They’re smiling, her head tossed back as she laughs aloud at something he’s said, her long chestnut hair struck red as blood by the sun.

This is a memory, yes, but it’s partly a dream as well, a glimpse of a future he’s never understood till now.

There’s a man there, too, caught on the edge of the light, almost diaphanous in the haze of sunshine and sea-fret rolling in over the sand. As Ben and Rey watch the woman turns to him, reaches out, and when the man steps forward to meet her the sunlight seems to pass through their outstretched hands.

The woman seems less solid now, too. The skirts she’s gathered in her free hand take on a new translucency that begins at her edges and bleeds gradually inwards, until she and the man are gone and there is only the boy stood alone on the shore, the white-tipped waves licking around his legs and the wind ruffling his dark hair. He stares out over the sea as though searching for something, seemingly utterly unaware of his solitude.

Ben takes a shuddering breath, his eyes squeezing closed. Rey’s hand slips back into his and grips it tight.

 

-

 

“Rey—”

His eyes open to the endless sea of stars beyond the viewport, the silence of his rooms drawing in around him as the memory recedes and with it, Rey’s presence.

Glancing down, the cold clear light of space betrays the only sign that she was ever here: his bedsheet lying where she'd knelt, a faint ghostly warmth still lingering about it when he lifts it in his hands.

It's always the time just after she leaves where it feels most like a dream, and as that warmth fades he begins to think that maybe he'd imagined her after all.

 _I'm here,_ she'd said, but why would she be? She'd made her choice, and it wasn't him. There are some things even the Force can't mend. She wouldn't come to him even if it dragged her here. Ben grips the sheet tight, rests his head against the glass and closes his eyes again, letting the weight of grief pull him under.

They're all gone, now. It truly is just him.

Maybe he sleeps. Maybe he dreams. For certain, he mourns.

The bond stays cold.

**Author's Note:**

> merry christmas y'all


End file.
